I didn't use the word "read", this is slashdot after all.
The only assumption i made was that you didn't hit keys on your keyboard and click your mouse with your eyes shut and somehow fluke a vaguely on topic post to a web site.
Every jackpotting lottery reaches a point at which there is positive expectation in playing. Of couse in practice they it might never happen, but if the jackpot doesn't go off for long the payout starts to beat the odds.
The strange "pay the jackpot out on non-jackpot prizes instead of increasing forever" rule here makes it happen more often.
Though note this isn't a lock, they can lose money if too many people end up with winning tickets. Either because someone else actually hit the jackpot or because lots of people tried the buy hundreds of thousands of tickets at the same time.
There's more to the world than boom/bust economic cycles. Sure bad economic news is a reason to go for treasuries, but you have to consider other things like the government telling you they won't be paying you back.
The government is talking loudly about intentionally defaulting on its debt. And it's rational to buy that debt because it pays you 0.5% instead of just keeping the money in cash? Why? I get a better return putting the money into a CD with, say, bank of america - it's FDIC insured so backed by the government as much as a bond is (with no threats of not honoring the obligations from politicians).
Re:Economist: Republicans are at fault.
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 3, Informative
The debt problem started dozens of presidents ago..
Seriously?
"Dozens" would put us at a minimum two dozen presidents ago. That president fought in the Civil War. Three dozen and the President was born before the Treaty of Paris.
Re:Economist: Republicans are at fault.
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Yes eventually Social Security will have to be addressed but to include it in the debt ceiling was ludicrous.
What other treasury borrowings do you want to exclude from counting as debt?
Re:Most economists think this isn't enough?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Your low wage dead end job example is flawed because the US is the premier economic power in the world, right? If you already have a college education and a couple of phds and so on, and you still find yourself stuck in debt even though you have a high income top of the field job then possibly borrowing more on student loans isn't the right solution?
You are also making the fundamental assumption that the government spending can actually fix the current economic problems. Which might be true, but it's not a self evident truth.
Because they aren't proposing spending that much money. If the US government borrowed 600,00,000 trillion dollars the same thing would happen.
Printing money is exactly the same as borrowing it in terms of inflation. Until you repay it off course, but that's never going to happen.
Re:Well of course it will be downgraded...
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Sort of, it's like a family on $45,000/yr income having a $180,000 debt and spending $72,000/yr.
Well it would be if your 400% of tax receipts was correct, but the US debt is $14 trillion and Federal tax receipts are $2.2 trillion. That is over 600%.
The debt level really doesn't matter that much (well assuming the lenders don't refuse to roll it over), the fact that it has been continually increasing during "boom times" is the problem. That Keynesian economics stuff requires running surpluses in the booms so that you can run deficits in the busts...
Re:Yet just to clarify (and speculate)
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
That's not how a CDS works. $4.8 billion spent on credit default swaps against US debt would pay out $762 billion if the US defaults and $0 if it does not (over the timeframe of the CDS) - according to the price in that article anyway.
But there's no way this is being pushed by the "rich fat cats", this is politicians being politicians. They voted to spend more money than they earned knowing it would reach the debt ceiling and they'd have to increase it. Now it's some grandstanding to pretend they are for reducing government debt. One this has passed they'll vote for spending too much again since they'll be able to say "see I'm against spending too much, I fought over the debt ceiling".
You are claiming that if I run a Ponzi scheme and I make sure that some of the payments actually come from a revenue stream other than investors money then it actually isn't a Ponzi scheme?
So as long as I invest say 10% of the each investor's investment in something that pays some return , say a savings account at the local bank, and a cent or so of each payment out of that then I'm all legal?
How stupid are these people who don't do that and go to jail?
Your credit card example is pretty much irrelevant, since the US isn't doing that. It's ever increasing the amount on the card and only making interest payments each month. If you were to do that then at some point the credit card company will stop raising your limit.
Sure back before Nixon it was possible the US could be unable to pay back their debt. But since then, yes because a bit of paper says they will they are magically able to.
If you can convince the bank to let you repay them in currency that you're household can print, then you to could do the same. You don't even need a household constitution.
Anyway So what? Did the US have the exact same monetary policies over than entire time? If not then why does it matter that it happened to be a single entity over that time period?
The US did default once in the 70s for a few days at least, so you've heard wrong.
The US has forcefully restructured its debt obligations twice in that time period (essentially telling lenders, "You know that $X we owe you? We are only going to pay you back $Y, which is significantly smaller than X).
US debt is rated AAA because the ratings agencies are at least a decade behind the times. These are the same ratings agencies that declared that subprime mortgage bonds were AAA in 2007.
The US announced to the world that paying it's debts is the least important expense and if no one will loan them the money to pay the interest on their existing loans they'll simply default all the while spending an order of magnitude more money that those interest payments on other things.
And what happened when they did this?
Treasuries went up. In other words creditors declared that they'd charge even lower rates to the US.
Creditors are clearly retarded, and why shouldn't the US exploit that idiocy as much as possible before those creditors start acting rationally?
Gazprom is Russian and he likely cares about things involving his country not somewhere half way across the world.
Murdoch owns lots of media in the US, and hence his companies doing bad things in the UK is of far more relevance on slashdot (a US site) than corruption in the political/police system in another country.
But China also has 1.3 billion people in it, whereas the US has a bit over 300 million. So there numbers in prison shouldn't be anywhere near each other...
What other form factor is there once you decide to use a touch screen for your input device? Why would you make the device bigger than the screen, given it's designed to be portable? Why would you make the device any other shape then the shape of the LCD touch screen panel you are using? Why would you spend a fortune more on a non-standard LCD shape?
And of course the HTC Touch launched 25 days before the iPhone.
But you're spending money on educating those users, which is money that isn't helping you make money or to be more profitable.
Hiring the more expensive sysadmin instead of the kid just out of high school to run those uniz machines is also spending money which isn't helping you make money or to be more profitable. Same with the programmers. Sure, sure the cheap ones will screw up and somebody might hack in and steal hundreds of millions of credit cards numbers, names, and addresses; then again the more expensive ones don't provide any guarantees either. So yet more money, not helping you make money or to be more profitable.
And spending money to secure your computers is silly too right? You are spending money to buy something that will not even help you make money or be more profitable... Worked well for Sony after all.
Wouldn't that make cause you to have not correctly licensed software? Given the licenses include a clause saying you agree they can check your machines for license compliance, if you then don't do that you've violated the license...
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I didn't use the word "read", this is slashdot after all.
The only assumption i made was that you didn't hit keys on your keyboard and click your mouse with your eyes shut and somehow fluke a vaguely on topic post to a web site.
Every jackpotting lottery reaches a point at which there is positive expectation in playing. Of couse in practice they it might never happen, but if the jackpot doesn't go off for long the payout starts to beat the odds.
The strange "pay the jackpot out on non-jackpot prizes instead of increasing forever" rule here makes it happen more often.
Though note this isn't a lock, they can lose money if too many people end up with winning tickets. Either because someone else actually hit the jackpot or because lots of people tried the buy hundreds of thousands of tickets at the same time.
Why would you look at a movie review article then? Let alone comment on one?
The "roads" are made of water, making it wheeled motor vehicles not that practical. For a good portion of the city anyway.
There's more to the world than boom/bust economic cycles. Sure bad economic news is a reason to go for treasuries, but you have to consider other things like the government telling you they won't be paying you back.
The government is talking loudly about intentionally defaulting on its debt. And it's rational to buy that debt because it pays you 0.5% instead of just keeping the money in cash? Why? I get a better return putting the money into a CD with, say, bank of america - it's FDIC insured so backed by the government as much as a bond is (with no threats of not honoring the obligations from politicians).
Seriously?
"Dozens" would put us at a minimum two dozen presidents ago. That president fought in the Civil War. Three dozen and the President was born before the Treaty of Paris.
What other treasury borrowings do you want to exclude from counting as debt?
Your low wage dead end job example is flawed because the US is the premier economic power in the world, right? If you already have a college education and a couple of phds and so on, and you still find yourself stuck in debt even though you have a high income top of the field job then possibly borrowing more on student loans isn't the right solution?
You are also making the fundamental assumption that the government spending can actually fix the current economic problems. Which might be true, but it's not a self evident truth.
Because they aren't proposing spending that much money. If the US government borrowed 600,00,000 trillion dollars the same thing would happen.
Printing money is exactly the same as borrowing it in terms of inflation. Until you repay it off course, but that's never going to happen.
Sort of, it's like a family on $45,000/yr income having a $180,000 debt and spending $72,000/yr.
Well it would be if your 400% of tax receipts was correct, but the US debt is $14 trillion and Federal tax receipts are $2.2 trillion. That is over 600%.
The debt level really doesn't matter that much (well assuming the lenders don't refuse to roll it over), the fact that it has been continually increasing during "boom times" is the problem. That Keynesian economics stuff requires running surpluses in the booms so that you can run deficits in the busts...
That's not how a CDS works. $4.8 billion spent on credit default swaps against US debt would pay out $762 billion if the US defaults and $0 if it does not (over the timeframe of the CDS) - according to the price in that article anyway.
But there's no way this is being pushed by the "rich fat cats", this is politicians being politicians. They voted to spend more money than they earned knowing it would reach the debt ceiling and they'd have to increase it. Now it's some grandstanding to pretend they are for reducing government debt. One this has passed they'll vote for spending too much again since they'll be able to say "see I'm against spending too much, I fought over the debt ceiling".
You invested in the US econoic recovery?
You're dumber than those clever politicians.
s/you're/your/ because I am an idiot.
Seriously.
You are claiming that if I run a Ponzi scheme and I make sure that some of the payments actually come from a revenue stream other than investors money then it actually isn't a Ponzi scheme?
So as long as I invest say 10% of the each investor's investment in something that pays some return , say a savings account at the local bank, and a cent or so of each payment out of that then I'm all legal?
How stupid are these people who don't do that and go to jail?
Your credit card example is pretty much irrelevant, since the US isn't doing that. It's ever increasing the amount on the card and only making interest payments each month. If you were to do that then at some point the credit card company will stop raising your limit.
Yes.
Sure back before Nixon it was possible the US could be unable to pay back their debt. But since then, yes because a bit of paper says they will they are magically able to.
If you can convince the bank to let you repay them in currency that you're household can print, then you to could do the same. You don't even need a household constitution.
And house prices always go up,r ight?
Anyway So what? Did the US have the exact same monetary policies over than entire time? If not then why does it matter that it happened to be a single entity over that time period?
The US did default once in the 70s for a few days at least, so you've heard wrong.
The US has forcefully restructured its debt obligations twice in that time period (essentially telling lenders, "You know that $X we owe you? We are only going to pay you back $Y, which is significantly smaller than X).
US debt is rated AAA because the ratings agencies are at least a decade behind the times. These are the same ratings agencies that declared that subprime mortgage bonds were AAA in 2007.
Except the opposite happened.
The US announced to the world that paying it's debts is the least important expense and if no one will loan them the money to pay the interest on their existing loans they'll simply default all the while spending an order of magnitude more money that those interest payments on other things.
And what happened when they did this?
Treasuries went up. In other words creditors declared that they'd charge even lower rates to the US.
Creditors are clearly retarded, and why shouldn't the US exploit that idiocy as much as possible before those creditors start acting rationally?
then it's more a case of you "stealing" their code and sticking GPL/MIT licensing on something you don't own the copyright to.
Of course is derived from GPLed code then that licensing is required in the first place.
Gazprom is Russian and he likely cares about things involving his country not somewhere half way across the world.
Murdoch owns lots of media in the US, and hence his companies doing bad things in the UK is of far more relevance on slashdot (a US site) than corruption in the political/police system in another country.
Authoritarian governments generally lock people up who haven't committed crimes more often than democracies.
And I wasn't making a point.
But China also has 1.3 billion people in it, whereas the US has a bit over 300 million. So there numbers in prison shouldn't be anywhere near each other...
What other form factor is there once you decide to use a touch screen for your input device? Why would you make the device bigger than the screen, given it's designed to be portable? Why would you make the device any other shape then the shape of the LCD touch screen panel you are using? Why would you spend a fortune more on a non-standard LCD shape?
And of course the HTC Touch launched 25 days before the iPhone.
But you're spending money on educating those users, which is money that isn't helping you make money or to be more profitable.
Hiring the more expensive sysadmin instead of the kid just out of high school to run those uniz machines is also spending money which isn't helping you make money or to be more profitable. Same with the programmers. Sure, sure the cheap ones will screw up and somebody might hack in and steal hundreds of millions of credit cards numbers, names, and addresses; then again the more expensive ones don't provide any guarantees either. So yet more money, not helping you make money or to be more profitable.
And spending money to secure your computers is silly too right? You are spending money to buy something that will not even help you make money or be more profitable... Worked well for Sony after all.
Wouldn't that make cause you to have not correctly licensed software? Given the licenses include a clause saying you agree they can check your machines for license compliance, if you then don't do that you've violated the license...